In this post, I'll look at the renderings of the various Adobe DNG profiles on a color by color basis.

If you haven't taken a look at Part 1 of this, I'd strongly suggest you do - it's there that I set the scene for these charts, and talk about how to interpret them.

As a reminder, what we're looking at here is the color rendition embedded in the various default Adobe camera profiles for the Canon 5DII. We're looking at that for colors that approximate to the key color patches on a Gretag Macbeth 24 patch color chart. Also, remember that the various "camera" profiles are intended to mimic the camera settings, not necessarily to be what Adobe might consider to be pleasing color renditions.

First up, this is the chart for the three main Gretag patches - CC13 (blue), CC14 (green) and CC15 (red)



What you see here is a few things:

1. The Adobe Standard profile, is, in almost all cases, closest to the reference color
2. Reds are easily the most "manipulated" color. This is interesting in light of the fairly frequent complaints about "Adobe Red" with previous version of ACR and Lightroom; it may well be that the fairly aggressive reductions in red are a fix for this. Even the Adobe Standard profile reduces the magnitude of red quite substantially.
   
3. The largest reduction in red, and the biggest hue shift for red is in the Camera Portrait setting. Reasonable, given that red faces are a frequent complaint.
4. Green is mostly fairly "untwisted, with the exception of the Camera Portrait setting, which drift across towards yellow quite significantly.
5. Green is also fairly compressed at the upper end - Camera Landscape flattens the rendition quite significantly, presumably to keep the greens in foliage either from getting to light and washed out, or too dark.
6. Blues are a mixed bag. The Camera Faithful, Camera Neutral and Camera Standard profiles reduce blue intensities considerably. The Camera Landscape setting however allows significantly higher intensity, but flattens out aggressively. Presumably this is to give really blue skies, as opposed to somewhat over-exposed white-blue skies you often see.

Next up, we'll take a look that the yellow (CC16), magenta (CC17) and cyan (CC18) patches:


What we see is:

1. Yellow is very close to reference in almost all cases. Some profiles reduce intensity, but there are few dramatic hue shifts. One reason for this is probably that yellow is quite close to the various skin tones, and significant hue changes would probably be undesirable.
2. For magenta, the biggest variation is in the Camera Portrait profile, with intensities being compressed into a relatively small, quite high, range. This again is probably to maintain skin tones regardless of exposure. Camera Landscape compresses magenta down quite significantly.
3. In cyan, the big variation is in Camera Portrait. Again, almost certainly to preserve skin tones. Similar to the case for blue, the Landscape Profile seems to try to preserve sky tones.

Finally, the two skin tones, light skin (CC2) and dark skin (CC1). What's interesting here is that there is very little hue shift. Presumable because human color perception is very sensitive to skin tones - even small variations are regarded as unpleasant.



In part 3, I'll show the charts on a by profile basis, rather than a by color basis.